Dear keNt,
Repeat after me - single syllable with a single vowel before the final consonant, double the consonant. Sad, saDDer, saDDest. On your Russian salary no super-model's going to be rushin' to marry you.
Regards,
John

P.S. So you ddddidddd, keNt. And I'm D-lighted to see that.

Last edited by johnslat on Wed Apr 23, 2003 2:09 pm; edited 1 time in total

No doubt in my mind that the laziest I have seen are in Saudi. The downside of this is that it has a long-term effect on your teaching. That is why any lengthy spell working in saudi is professional suicide. Employers in the rest of the world will raise their eyebrows when they see you taught in the K of SA for periods.

Be warned ! You will get hooked on the money, and then no one outside the Mgic Kingdom will give you a job - even at a quarter of what you were getting here.

Dear scot47,
I'm curious as to what you mean by lazy Saudi students having a long-term effect on one's teaching. Perhaps I've just been here too long to notice. But actually I've found that lazy students make me work harder. From the context, though, I assume the effects you're talking about are negative ones. Could you list some of them? ( and no - I'm not being ironic or sarcastic - I simply don't know what those effects are ).
Regards,
John

I know several foreign teachers here in SE Mexico who have commented that so many of their students are lazy. The biggest compaint I hear is that -- although students tend to be very polite, friendly, cooperative in class, willing to learn, and all that -- they are too lazy to put in much time on English outside of class, that they don't give high enough priority to learning English. They use any excuse for arriving late to class or being absent from class. Homework assignments, if done at all, are often incomplete, hastily done, and/or not ready to turn in on time.

Compared to the Midwest (USA) work ethic that I was accustomed to before moving here, local students could be viewed as lazy by some people, I imagine. By the same token, so could local teachers for that matter.

Personally, I contribute much of it to local culture. It's common procedure to wait until the last minute or later to do things. Priority usually isn't given to things such as time, efficiency, standards, quality over quantity, and planning ahead.

I wouldn't say most students here are lazy. They just don't work as hard or as fast at learning English as they probably should.

Lazy students have low expectations of themselves and of their teachers.
They expect you to let them fool around and do nothing much. The pressure is there all the time. Everyone gives in to a certain extent.

But now it is the weekend. So I can go and have whoopee ! maybe read a book. Listen to some music. Tomorrow I'll go and have a coffee somewhere. Isn't life exciting ? Well no but I don't like exciting.

Ben around de block's observations on Mexican students could be applied one on one to Chinese students too!

In China's case, institutional attitudes such as how the principal or head master of a school views their students (and how you MUST view them if you want to keep your job) adds that CHinese-cultural dimension.
Whether your students pass or fail is not decided by a teacher but by the system.

These students are hard up when confronted with reality: I once had 4 private students in a class of my own. One girl once was absent. When she came three days later, she complained I had failed to call her. Call yher? "Yes, I was too busy to come. You should have called me to tell me what you had covered in the lesson..."
And she quit the game after that lesson, demanding, but not getting, the balance of her tuition she had paid!!

Dear scot47,
I don't want to seem contentious; but lazy students have never negatively affected my work - in fact, as mentioned before, they make me work harder. I think what matters is what motivates you, as a teacher. And, lest this sound vainglorious, let me state from the outset that it is, in my opinion, nothing anyone can " take credit " for; it's simply the way life and your genes? experiences? whatever have shaped you to be. I try to avoid the trap of " perfectionism ", since no job can ever be done perfectly. But I always attempt to do the best job I'm capable of doing. What sort of students I have is really irrelevant - I simply don't have a choice. I can't feel good about myself if I do less than my best. It's a selfish motivation, really - I know that if I slack off, that little voice inside is going to give me hell. And it's easier for me to put in the time and effort than to have to listen to that persistent nagging. It's all very much like my exercising. There's only one thing I hate more than going to the gym, and that's NOT going, because when I do skip a session, guess who I've got to listen to again? Obsessive/compulsive - yup, but I'd say some o/c can be good, as long as: 1. you don't aim for perfection; and 2. you're o/c about the right things.
Regards,
John

Just a comment about teaching grammar. Where I work (korea) , foreign teachers are hired to teach mainly conversation with Korean teachers teaching the bulk of the grammmar classes. There are several problems with this approach. The biggest one being that many of the Korean teachers don't really understand English grammar themselves and therefore teach flawed grammatical structures to their students. Many Korean- English grammmar books are full of mistakes, spelling, puntuation as well as usage.
So when a native speaker tries to correct these mistakes in a conversation class, they are confronted with years of bad teaching, bad grammar books and also with students who tend to think that "you" the foreign teacher don't know what you are talking about.

It's a difficult thing to deal with, and one has to be careful not to offend students "honor" here. They absolutely hate being corrected in front of other students. I've never worked in Japan, but I assume that things are similar there.

Some waigog-in
same observation here in China. The division of labour - expats for mere conversation prctice, local teachers for the "substantive" job - seems to have been introduced on the recommendation of American experts two to three decades ago. I can only say they are the grave-diggers of English instruction in this region! Note how much better English was implanted in the local education systems of Singapore and Hong Kong until recently, with CHinese students asking pertinent questions about grammar points. Not to mention a far better understanding of the language as such by locals! English used to be a language of instruction there. That's a thing of the past now, thanks to the popularising of English and the consequent lowering of standards.
This leads to fossilised CHinglish. You can even see such foreign gibberish masquerading as "English" instructions in manuals that accompany locally-made products for export markets. I have never favoured this approach, and even have serious qualms about this oral English mania!